Watson Writes: Student immigrants need support, guidance at UL

Last week, President Donald Trump moved to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which allows for many undocumented immigrants who were brought into the country as children to remain in the U.S. without being deported.

After some consideration, Trump threw the issue at Congress and encouraged a program like DACA to be created under his administration, but the fate of any such program is still unsure.

According to the New York Times, “The president’s wavering was reflected in a day of conflicting messages from him and his team. Hours after his statement was released, Mr. Trump told reporters that he had ‘great love’ for the beneficiaries of the program he had just ended.”

Regardless of the fate of DACA, the program being in jeopardy is enough to unsettle the DREAMers, or the beneficiaries of DACA. Many of the DREAMers, immigrants who have lived illegally in the U.S. for the majority of their lives, are college students.

According to NPR.org, “In 2014, the Migration Policy Institute estimated about 241,000 people who were eligible for DACA were enrolled in college. Another 57,000 of those eligible at the time had completed at least a bachelor’s degree.”

Due to this, some colleges have already taken action to protect the DREAMer students on their campuses.

NPR reported in the same piece: “All 10 campuses in the (University of California) system will also expand counseling and legal services this fall, especially to students whose DACA eligibility is due to expire.”

Even Ivy League universities have released statements of their own in defense of their students under DACA.

CNN reported: “Harvard said it does not consider immigration status as part of its admissions and financial aid process. While it is not a ‘sanctuary campus,’ the university noted that it ‘does not voluntarily share information on the immigration status of undocumented community members, and federal officials attempting to enforce immigration laws on campus are required to obtain a judicial warrant.’”

Campuses in the UC system and the Ivy League are much more liberal than southern colleges, especially the faculty and staff therein. It is more likely to find support for the repeal of programs like DACA in campuses such as ours, where many express a desire to tighten national immigration practices.

The UL Lafayette college portrait on CollegePortraits.org shows 69 percent of UL Lafayette students are white and 90 percent are from Louisiana. It isn’t hard, given this information, to imagine immigrant students might feel isolated or alienated on campus.

It is almost certain that there are DACA beneficiaries on the UL Lafayette campus, given our hundreds of international and immigrant students. In wake of this news, DREAMer students need support, help, and understanding from their classmates and professors.

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Melissa Watson joined The Vermilion in the summer of 2017. She is a graduate of Lafayette High, where she was managing editor of the LHS paper, Parlez-Vous. Melissa has a passion for in-depth opinion writing and hopes to pursue that as a political columnist.